


Remscéla

by aeli_kindara



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1930s Brooklyn, Artist Steve, Chronic Illness, Irish mythology is relevant don't look at me like that, M/M, Pre-CATFA, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sarah Rogers is dealt a difficult hand, figuring out family, roller skating, shenanigans in Central Park
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 14:39:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14854680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: “It’s going to rain,” says Steve.Bucky squints out the window. He sways slightly as the train jolts on its tracks, but doesn’t reach for the handhold. Through the trusses, the sky outside is gray, reflecting oily and leaden on the East River. The air feels heavy, warm for late October. “It’s not going to rain.”Steve snorts. He can’t help smiling. “Itis. You know it is. Not everything in the world just arranges itself according to the will of Bucky Barnes.”





	Remscéla

**Author's Note:**

> **remscéla** (pl. n., Irish mythology): "fore-tales"; preludes to a greater epic, especially tales of the Ulster Cycle preceding the _Táin Bó Cuailnge_.
> 
> For Leo. I hope you enjoy. :)

### I. Summer, 1930.

Steve is almost twelve when he moves to Congress Street and for the first time in his life stops sharing a bed with his mother. 

The walls of their new apartment aren’t mildewed and damp, and the air isn’t thick with other tenants’ smoke. He has an honest-to-god window out to the street, where he can curl up with his sketchbook and his blankets and watch the other boys play shinny and stickball. It’s still small, yes, and they’re still sharing with another family — Polish, this time — and Sarah still gets worried eyes when she listens to his cough, but at least she’s not coughing herself, now, and as far as Steve’s concerned, that’s progress.

They’re not talking about how they got here, when everyone else in the world seems to be sinking further under the crushing wheel of the depression. They’re not talking about the pension check Sarah carries like gold each month until she can cash it, or about the thick, creamy paper of the approved application sitting folded and untouched in the top dresser drawer. They’re definitely not talking about the years they could have lived like this, if the marriage certificate hadn’t been lost; if Joseph and Sarah Rogers had ever really signed one at all.

“We _were_ married,” she’d said, the second morning Steve was home from the hospital. It was his third stay in as many years, and he was too weak and exhausted to lie when she’d confronted him with the envelope, lips tight and face gray, and asked him what he’d done.

“I submitted the application for you.” He’d been proud of how his voice came out — not strong, but steady, still higher than he’d like. He wanted it to drop; prayed that in this, at least, his body wouldn’t betray him.

“I tried,” she’d said, in a voice that wavered like a candle. “We’d lost the paperwork. The city couldn’t — did they find it?”

Steve had closed his eyes. The light and the smell of coal smoke stabbed through his skull. At eleven years old, he couldn’t walk up the tenement stairs without stopping to rest; he couldn’t run a baseball diamond, could barely carry his books to school. But he could forge a signature. “I made one.”

Sarah had sucked in her breath. He’d opened his eyes again to watch the emotions on her face; shock, then fear, then, briefly, anger. They all faded to sorrow, in the end, and she’d just said _Stevie_ , in a voice like the Atlantic Ocean.

“We _were_ married,” she’d said later, and Steve had thought of mustard gas, the killing fields of the Aisne and the men who chose them. He’d thought of his father’s lungs, blistered and laboring; of his father’s throat closing, heart failing, eyes blurring his last sight into streaks of brown and red and gray.  

He’d thought of his mother opening another letter. Of her hand on her pregnant belly and the other rising to clutch her mouth, paper falling senseless from her fingers. He’d thought of the tears in her eyes and the sobs that must have racked his own unborn body, and he’d chosen to believe her. 

\---

The new apartment is in a new school district. There are Spanish and Syrian families on their block; more Irish, fewer Italians. That doesn’t matter much to Steve — bullies, he’s found, come from everywhere — but his mother seems to like it, even speaks in lilting, unfamiliar syllables with the downstairs neighbor sometimes, words Steve has never learned. They don’t ever get many in before they dissolve laughing so hard they cry, and Steve thinks that’s good, to hear his mother laughing; he toys with his sketchbook and listens out the window and wishes he knew how to draw happiness on her mouth.

But he’s still bed-bound, and Mrs. Kirwan downstairs is still a voice without a face, so he draws the boys outside instead. The windows are permanently open against the summer heat, and he can hear their shouts, the loud clack and whirr of their roller skates, the honking of trucks and taxis when their game spills across the thoroughfare. They use manhole covers for goals and a disk of wood for a puck, and the game seems to consist primarily of flying limbs and sticks and skates and bragging over bloody elbows. 

It’s an interesting challenge to draw — motion and energy, forms as indistinct blurs. The first few days in the new apartment, Steve sketches landscapes, the new skyline, but soon his pencil is tracing shoulders and hips, crosshatching scrapes onto skinny arms, striving for the correct angle of a knee as its owner braces to shoot.

He draws other things, too. Arms over shoulders, laughing faces. One draws his attention over and over again. He has dark hair that curls over his forehead and he laughs the loudest of them all. Steve thinks he hasn’t ever known anyone who smiles so much. The others call him Bucky.

It’s not just the smiling that catches Steve’s eye, though. It’s the expression on his face when he thinks no one’s looking at him. His eyes turn careful then, thoughtful. He watches the other boys like he sees things no one else does. He watches the other boys like Steve.

He lets his hair grow longer than the other boys do, usually, and one day in late July he shows up for shinny with a tiny braid tied off with a pink ribbon tucked behind his right ear.

The mockery is predictable and immediate. Steve braces himself, watching from the window, for the inevitable: Bucky’s face on the asphalt, knees in his back. His blood running into the storm drain. As the laughter ricochets through the canyon of tenements, Steve experimentally pushes himself out of bed. He’s still weak on his feet, still dizzy standing up, but he can make it down the fire escape; can fight at Bucky’s side if no one else will. He has to.

His vision clouds with spots for a moment, and he braces himself on the bedpost. When his eyes clear, his gaze is still on the street below.

Bucky hasn’t reacted to the mockery, hasn’t raised his fists for a fight. He just crosses his arms over his chest, grins broadly, and says, “Yeah, and how many girls have given _you_ ribbons, Daly?”

And just like that, the laughter’s turned again, and Daly is lunging for Bucky, catching him around the chest, and they go to the pavement together, but they’re laughing, both of them, wrestling briefly before Daly makes a grab for the ribbon and Bucky pins him, says “That’s my _sister’s,_ you punk,” and scrubs his knuckles across his opponent’s scalp. When they get up, they’re both flushed and grinning, and the ribbon is still in Bucky’s hair.

Steve sinks back onto the mattress, feeling faint. He’s not positive it’s just from the exertion, just from the elevated beat of his heart.

If he were strong like Bucky, he’d be able to pin the bullies. Maybe he’d be able to stop them; keep them from hurting other kids. Maybe they’d take their defeat gracefully, fall as his enemies and rise again as friends.

Maybe he wouldn’t know they were bullies at all.

\---

Steve spends August drawing double faces. Charm and cruelty, grief and laughter, wistfulness and certainty, joy and pain. He draws his own a few times, studying himself in the mirror. His cheeks are pinched; he draws the lines of sickness. He tries to put the fire in his eyes.

He draws Bucky over and over. He strives to master the creases in his smiling cheeks, the analytical curiosity in his gaze.

By the start of the school term, he’s well enough to go. Every bout of illness feels like a new reset of what he can do, but he’s slowly relearning his limits, pushing them steadily from day to day. He’s at last free of his racking cough, but his lungs still come up short more often than they should. His heart still goes frantic like a bird trapped in his chest, and he’s learned to sit down and put his head between his knees when he needs to, but the feeling of nausea that follows he’ll have to just learn to ignore.

When he slings his book-strap over his shoulders, they feel skinny even to him. He fights for his lunch money and loses. His second day goes much like his first.

His tormentors include Daly. He’d laugh if it were funny. One day, the third week of school, he finds Daly and two friends down an alley on his route home, swinging a bag that yowls like a cat.

It is, in fact, a cat. The element of surprise is all Steve has, and he uses it, sprinting down the alley to tackle Daly from behind. When he drops the bag with a startled yelp, Steve hurls himself for it like a grenade. He curls it against his chest and manages to work the knot free as the first kicks rain on his back, and drops it when he’s dragged up by the collar of his shirt. Through a fist to the face, he sees a scraggly gray blur wrestle itself free of the burlap and streak away.

He makes it home over an hour later, dragging his books by the strap because he can’t bear the weight across his battered back. His face is bloody, with a darkening black eye, but a triumph edged with nausea sings in his skull.

His mother isn’t home yet from her shift at the hospital. Mrs. Kowalczyk, their Polish neighbor, has so far treated them with serene indifference, but she takes one look at Steve’s face and sits him down at the kitchen sink. She heats the water she uses to dab at his face, and by the time Sarah gets home, he’s looking more respectable than he did, though not enough to keep her face from twisting with guilt.

“Stevie,” she murmurs later, looking at their dinner and not at him. “What happened?”

Steve swallows. He’s never made a habit of lying to his mother. “They were hurting a cat.”

She risks a watery glance at his face, and then away again. “And you can’t let well enough alone?”

He fights down the anger that surges in his chest. Breathing through it hurts. He thinks, sometimes, that his mother has been grieving him since before he was born. But he has this broken body to live in; he has this life, however half-colored, to use as he sees fit.

“No,” he says. “I can’t.”

He expects her to argue. But she just sighs and rises, leaving her plate untouched. She runs her fingers through the hair at his forehead. “Stevie,” she says, and retreats to her bed.

He expects her to argue. He thinks this is worse.

\---

They ambush him on the way to school the next Monday.

He should be expecting it. But his mind is full of fingers in his hair, marriage certificates and words in Irish and the rarely glimpsed seastorm of Sarah’s eyes. She pierced him with it in church on Sunday, fingers on her rosary and the stain of Christ’s blood lingering on her mouth.

Steve’s father wasn’t Catholic, she’s told him. He wonders what that would be like sometimes. But the Presbyterian church seems as foreign as the moon.

He should be expecting it, but he’s not, and the first blow sends him sprawling, contents of his backpack spilling out over the ground. He glimpses Daly’s ugly face, twisted with rage and satisfaction, and has barely enough time to curl up in defense against the kick that comes for his stomach.

He grabs Daly’s ankle to trip him, releases it an instant later and rolls. He comes up against a garbage can, which tips over; in desperation, he grabs the lid and flings it up as a shield against the next blow.

What he’ll do after that, he has no idea. But he’s surging to his feet, shield in front of him, when a voice from behind him says, “What the hell is this?”

Steve freezes. Daly freezes. The voice belongs to Bucky.

“He started it,” says Daly immediately. He turns to look at Bucky with a fawning expression on his face, and Steve sees Bucky turn that calm, incisive gaze on him, and then on Steve.

His cheeks flush against his will. He hopes it’s hidden under the bruises and mud. He’s studied that expression inside and out, drawn it so many times. It’s never been turned on him.

“That how he got that black eye?” says Bucky, and there’s a sarcastic slant to his words.

Daly opens his mouth. Bucky doesn’t look at him. “Get the fuck out of here,” he says, and Steve realizes with an incongruous thrill of astonishment that Bucky is not talking to him. Daly gapes, sputters, then turns bright red and stumbles away.

Bucky evaluates him for a moment longer. Then he says, “You okay?”

Steve lowers his shield. “I’m fine.” Then, in interests of accuracy: “He’s right. I did start it.”

He doesn’t get an immediate answer. Bucky’s looking around, taking in the scene. Steve’s books and papers have escaped their tidy binding; they’re strewn in the mud. “You’re new here,” Bucky says. “I’ve seen you around.”

That startles Steve so badly that he blurts, “He was hurting a cat.”

He flushes immediately. He didn’t mean to reveal that. But Bucky just studies his face and asks, “This today, or —?”

Steve feels like he’s being interviewed by the police. “Friday.”

“What happened to the cat?”

The question throws him. His mother didn’t ask it; Mrs. Kowalczyk didn’t ask it, though he’s not sure she speaks enough English to understand. He says, “It got away.”

Bucky nods once, like Steve’s passed a test. He sticks out his hand. “James Buchanan Barnes,” he says. “Call me Bucky.”

It occurs to Steve too late to wipe his palm on his trousers. It’s gritty with mud as he takes Bucky’s. He squares his jaw, though, and says, “Steve. Steve Rogers.” as calmly as he can.

When Bucky releases his hand, Steve expects him to turn away — deliver an indifferent _see you around_ and go about his life. Instead, he crouches to help tidy Steve’s scattered belongings. History textbook, math homework, penmanship worksheets and Colum’s _Homer_ , and Steve realizes too late his sketchbook is sprawled open on the ground.

He starts forward just as Bucky picks it up. The page is stained with dirty water; Bucky brushes mud clear of it and says, “Hey, these are good.”

Steve braces himself. But the page is of drawings of his mother, that faraway look in her eyes. Like if she could, she’d fly back to Ireland, shed the horror and cacophony of New York and the millstone of a slowly dying child like nothing more than a snake’s worn out skin.

It’s just his mother. He still feels raw. Exposed, like Bucky’s eyes are raking through his soul.

Then Bucky turns the page.

There’s a perfectly good reason. There’s more grit between the sheets of paper, where the corner of the sketchbook hit the ground. Bucky raises his hand to wipe it clear, and it stops midair.

He says, “This is me.”

It’s not a page of faces. It’s not the look Bucky’s wearing now. But it is Bucky smiling, Bucky laughing, the lines of Bucky’s body as he rams another player, as he goes chasing after the puck. In the corner, a quick sketch, is Bucky’s face, in profile. There’s a braid and a ribbon in his hair.

Steve braces himself. His shield is still at his feet.

But Bucky doesn’t drop the sketchbook and start throwing punches. He just looks over the page, carefully. His thumb rubs mud from his own likeness, smooths over the tiny braid.

“You live on Congress,” he says, and glances at Steve to catch his nod of confirmation. Then he says, “Why didn’t you ever come out? You coulda played with us.”

“I was sick,” Steve admits. “All summer.”

_All year,_ he doesn’t say. _All my life. You kind of get used to it. Except when you don’t._

Bucky just nods, like this is a reasonable explanation; for the drawings, for all of it. He closes the sketchbook and hands it back. He says, “Next time. I’ll help you kick Daly’s ass if you like.”

“I’ve never been on skates before,” Steve admits. “And I’m not very good in a fight.”

Bucky’s eyes travel over him. He takes a long moment before he answers.

“Bullshit,” he says. “You’re fine.”

 

### II. October 31, 1935.

“It’s going to rain,” says Steve.

Bucky squints out the window. He sways slightly as the train jolts on its tracks, but doesn’t reach for the handhold. Through the trusses, the sky outside is gray, reflecting oily and leaden on the East River. The air feels heavy, warm for late October. “It’s not going to rain.”

Steve snorts. He can’t help smiling. “It _is._ You know it is. Not everything in the world just arranges itself according to the will of Bucky Barnes.”

When Bucky turns to look at him, his smile is slow, and the warmth of it drops in coils into Steve’s belly. “You do." 

It’s true enough. This excursion was Bucky’s idea; a distraction, probably, from Sarah’s ill health. He flourished the advertisement one day a week ago — Halloween roller skating carnival and costume contest, Central Park — and coaxed Steve into making a costume; bribed him with the promise of skipping school in favor of a trip to the Met beforehand. He’s smiling now as if it’s all he ever wanted. As if their planned adventures are for his own sake, not an entire day built around Steve.

Steve punches Bucky’s arm, lightly, to hide his discomfort. “Shut up. I can’t believe you’re dragging me to this thing. You know it’s for kids, right?”

“You’re seventeen.” Apparently this is an argument that Steve _is_ a kid, which is patently absurd, but before he can open his mouth to say so, Bucky adds, “And you’ve never been roller skating. Whose fault is that?”

“Yours, probably.” The answer is automatic, but in a way, it’s true; they’ve talked about it since forever, since they first met, but at some point Bucky stopped playing shinny with his old crowd.

Bucky just grins. “Exactly. So I’m fixing it. Besides, if it rains, it’ll just make your Irish cow guy’s war paint look cooler. Everyone wins.”

“Cuchulain,” says Steve. “His name is Cuchulain, he was a mythological hero, it’s not war paint, and rain won’t make it look cooler.” He has the supplies in their satchel, along with the two pairs of skates. One is Bucky’s; the other is his sister Rebecca’s, which he swears up and down will fit Steve.

Also in the bag are a set of Steve’s paints, and a sheet he dyed purple for Cuchulainn’s tunic. At his feet is his shield: another old garbage can lid, carefully painted to the specifications outlined in Faraday’s _Cattle Raid of Cualnge_. It’s deep red with a white rim, and he emblazoned gold chains across it in a Celtic knot. His mother’s gaze lingered on it as while worked.

Bucky, by contrast, has opted for a simpler choice. His leather jacket and the aviator goggles in his pocket are the sum total of his costume. Bucky’s out of school, now; he goes on dates with girls. Steve knows he turned someone down for tonight. Maybe he imagines himself too grown up for Halloween.

Well, he can deal. Even if it _is_ going to rain. This was his idea, and he’s going to goddamn dress up for it. Steve says, “You’ve been talking up skating for a long time. It better be worth all this trouble.”

“It will be,” Bucky declares comfortably. “And so will the trouble.”

\---

They ride the subway to Fifth Avenue and walk the rest of the way to the Met, stowing the bag and shield under some bushes on the way. It’s a long trek, but Steve’s feeling the best he has in years. His lungs expand in his chest almost like they know it’s their job. His legs work steadily.

This has always been one of his favorite things about Bucky — that he lets Steve keep up, doesn’t stop him from hurling himself at the challenge of everyday existence. Sometimes, when Steve gets too stubborn, pushes himself past his limits, he sees a worried sort of hurt in Bucky’s eyes. But others, Bucky eggs him into riding the Cyclone and laughs when Steve throws up, hand broad and warm between his shoulderblades. When Steve looks up and wipes his mouth, Bucky tilts his chin, an invitation: _Being sick can be funny. It doesn’t always have to be sad._

He doesn’t feel sick today. He feels alive, electric. Bucky’s got that small, secret smile on his lips — the one he wears when he doesn’t need anyone else to know he’s happy. Steve’s fingers itch to draw it. To touch it, if only on the page.

The museum has new paintings by Rubens and Rosa, and an ancient Greek vase with the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece painted around its girth. Bucky lingers at the Egyptian temple when Steve slips upstairs to the European galleries. When he returns, Bucky’s only moved as far as the arms and armor hall. He’s standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, studying a set of full armor designed for a horse.

“You ever ride a horse?” he asks. He doesn’t turn his head to look at Steve, but he shifts so their shoulders bump together.

He knows Steve hasn’t. “Let’s start with roller skates,” Steve tells him drily, and Bucky laughs and leads the way out of the museum.

The sky is darker, and a few spitting drops of rain hit the sidewalk around them, but neither of them mentions it. There are a few children already out in costume, witches and goblins and knights. They find their things and change under the cover of the rhododendrons’ evergreen leaves.

Bucky pushes his goggles up onto his forehead to help Steve arrange his sheet-tunic. It’s a little makeshift, but they get it folded how he wants it, and he straps it all down with a belt before pulling out his kit of paints.

“So, what?” says Bucky. “Are we turning you blue?”

“Not according to the stories.” Steve holds the paints up to get a glimpse of their colors in the fading light. “He’s supposed to have had seven fingers on each hand and seven pupils in each eye, but I couldn’t pull that off, so I figured I’d go with the hair. And the dimples.”

Bucky raises his eyebrows. “Dimples.”

“Says it right here.” Steve pulls out the book. “‘Four dimples in each of his two cheeks; that is, a yellow dimple, and a green dimple, and a blue dimple, and a purple dimple.’”

Bucky leans over his shoulder, cheek briefly brushing Steve’s. “‘Fair indeed the boy who came then to show his form to the hosts,’” he reads. “They thought colorful face spots were fair, huh?”

Steve elbows him in the ribs. “I could’ve dressed up as Cuchulain in a battle frenzy. With one eye hanging out and his feet on backwards. You going to help me or not?”

Bucky does, massaging the dye into Steve’s scalp so his hair looks like a multicolored flame, applying careful thumbprints of color to each of his cheeks. He leans close, eyes sharp, exacting in his symmetry, and Steve feels his breath come short.

“You okay?” Bucky asks when he’s done. He hands Steve his shield — its unpainted reverse side acts as a blurry mirror — and caps the tubes of paint.

“Course,” Steve says. He can’t make out much in the shield, but his hair is a corona around his head, and he can see the matching lines of color on his face, forking in a V from the corners of his mouth. He might not look like Cuchulain, but he sure as hell doesn’t look like Steve.

“Come on,” says Bucky. “You gotta enter in the costume contest. We’ll be late.”

Steve smooths his hands over his tunic. For all that he designed the costume, he still feels slightly absurd. He picks up his shield and gets to his feet, and the sky opens up.

It’s instantaneous and absolute, a Biblical downpour, battering past the shelter of the rhododendron leaves. Bucky lets out a shout of laughter that’s almost lost in the din. Within seconds, Steve’s soaking, his tunic is returning from lavender to the royal purple state he hoped for when he dyed it in the tub. The water running down his face is red-brown with hair dye; he sputters some out of his mouth. Bucky’s own hair is plastered to his forehead, tangling with his goggles, but he grins, and grabs Steve’s hand.

He has to shout to be heard over the rain. “Come on. Let’s go skating.”

“You’re insane,” yells Steve. “There’s no way they haven’t called it off.”

Bucky shoulders the satchel. He lifts his eyebrows: challenge. “So?” he says.

\---

The rink at the Central Park mall is empty. Of course it is; any Halloween hopefuls have long since retreated to friendlier climes. Just a long stretch of smooth, open asphalt, spotted with puddles that shiver with raindrops.

Bucky doesn’t hesitate, though, just sits Steve down at the edge of it to strap on his skates. Each has four wheels and a leather strap that hooks over the top of his shoe. Bucky wrestles with a mechanism to make them fit, then cinches them down tight. He puts on his own kneeling before extending a hand to help Steve to his feet.

He totters delicately, feeling like a newborn deer. Bucky’s got his hand, tugging him gently toward the rink, but he hesitates.

The satchel has things in it he doesn’t want getting wet. The Faraday book. A newspaper clipping, a few weeks old: _U.S. to Find Work for 3,500 Artists._ And another: _Uncle Sam Expands as Art Patron._ There’s talk of free art schools, of more publicly commissioned murals, and of art shows, too, with prints and sculptures and paintings, vast traveling displays of American skill.

The CCC is growing as well. He knows it’s on Bucky’s mind; knows that the call of adventure is at war with his sense of familial duty. Stay home, help with his sisters. Look out, maybe, for Steve.

Steve’s not thinking about that. Bucky braces his unsteady weight as he leans to prop his shield over the bag, protecting it from the rain.

The downpour has scarcely let up. It drums on the metal of the garbage can lid, punctuated by the fatter, heavy drops plopping from the leafless twigs. The puddles reflect lamplight in slices. Steve’s footing is treacherous, unfamiliar, like he really does have backwards feet. Bucky tightens his grip on his hand.

“Come on,” he says again, and skates a few strides, pulling Steve after him.

Steve struggles for his balance for an instant and nearly falls. Then he realizes he can lean into it — trust Bucky with his weight, follow his lead — and the wheels roll clear beneath him. Bucky accelerates, drawing them both to the center of the rink, and anchors himself when he gets there, sweeping Steve in a wide, dizzy circle before catching him with a hand across his chest.

They’re both laughing. It’s a warm night, but the rain is cold, and Bucky’s body heat feels good against his skin. Steve feels Bucky’s breath stir his hair as he says, against Steve’s ear, “Think you can try under your own power?”

He doesn’t let go of Steve’s hand. He shows him how to pump his legs, back and forth, and helps him reposition the sheet-tunic so it stays out of the way. The trick is to not keep his feet in a straight line, but to swing between them, pushing off at an angle from one stride to the next. He still slips constantly, hanging onto the bare edge of control, but Bucky’s grip is solid when Steve leans desperately on his arm. He catches him once by the hips when he nearly faceplants, but soon they’re traveling wide circles around the rink together, Steve’s legs feeling less like those of a trembling colt.

“How do you stop,” he asks, on their fifth revolution. But the wind chooses that moment to howl past them, sending Steve nearly off balance, and Bucky leans close to half-yell, “What?”

“How do you _stop,_ ” Steve repeats, and it might be the earlier exertion or it might be that skating is harder than he knew, but his knees are wobbling dangerously beneath him.

Bucky catches him before he can fall. He pulls their bodies together and they spin, hip to hip, Steve’s face pressed suddenly against Bucky’s sodden shoulder. He turns his face away from the stinging rain and into Bucky’s collarbone, the warm exposed skin of his throat.

Bucky’s hand comes up to cup the back of his head. His thumb slides through the wet curls at the nape of Steve’s neck; his fingers brush the shell of his ear. Their skates roll gently to a stop. Steve tilts his head back, leaning into the touch, and looks at Bucky’s face.

He never did pull his goggles down off his forehead. Rainwater runs in streams over his eyelashes, drips off his nose. Steve kisses him without time for a second thought.

Bucky’s lips are soft and chilled by the rain, and they part at Steve’s touch. His hand slides to Steve’s face, his cheek. The other is still on his hip. Steve presses his palm to Bucky’s chest and hooks two fingers in the collar of his shirt.

Bucky draws back a moment later. “Yeah?” he breathes, and Steve says “yeah,” and Bucky kisses him again, slow.

He’s done this before, Steve knows, with girls; fewer than the kids at school used to think. Steve hasn’t, but it’s never seemed hard, and it isn’t. It’s just following what feels good.

Everything about Bucky feels good. Everything about standing here, on feet he trusts even less than usual, body to body and mouth to mouth, clothing streaming with rain. They kiss, and keep kissing, for seconds, for centuries; Steve thinks of the melting clocks at the MoMA, of Einstein’s man on a train approaching the speed of light, the delirious unraveling of time.

They break when Steve’s seized by a full-body shiver, and he hates that, suddenly and fiercely. Hates his own body, like he so seldom allows himself to; hates that he can’t take Bucky skating, can’t hold Bucky up when he’s weak and drained, can’t give Bucky a moment’s goddamn peace from always taking care of people, always being fine, tall and strong and laughing and untouchable.

But Bucky’s not looking untouchable now. His lips are flushed and swollen, and his eyes are dark, uncertain. His thumb is still tracing lines on Steve’s cheek.

“We should get warm,” Steve says, and his voice comes out low, fond. Bucky stills as if at a physical touch.

“My mother’s on the night shift,” adds Steve. “If you want to —”

“Yeah,” says Bucky. His voice is rough. He doesn’t take his eyes off Steve. “Yeah, okay.”

\---

They ride the train still in their sopping costumes, dripping rainwater onto the floor of the last car. The clack and sway of the tracks is comfortable, familiar, and the seats are empty, so they sprawl on opposite benches. The darkness outside blurs by.

“Cuchulain,” says Bucky, after a while. “Tell me about him.”

He says it toneless — unperformed. The voice he’s learned sounds sullen to his mother and his teachers; the one that slips out when he’s comfortable, when he doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks.

Steve leans his head against the hard seatback, shifting until it’s something like comfortable. “He was from Ulster,” he says. “Like my father.”

Bucky doesn’t raise his eyebrows at that, just nods and settles into a mirror of Steve’s pose and waits for Steve to go on.

“He was a mighty warrior. But no one ever believed it, because he was so small. A ‘beardless youth.’”

Bucky’s mouth curves in a hint of a smile.

“He went to join the boys training at the king’s capital when he was only four or five,” says Steve. He stares up at the ceiling, remembering. “And they fought him, because they didn’t know him. But he had a shield, and deflected their spears, and then went into a battle frenzy and defeated them all.”

He waits for Bucky to comment, but he doesn’t, so he adds, “They played a lot of hurling. Kind of like shinny, without the skates.”

“Skates are half the fun,” says Bucky.

“Yeah, but they didn’t have asphalt. Maybe they had ice in the winter. I don’t know.”

They’re on a train at the speed of light, he thinks. Having a conversation about nothing, about everything; a connecting strand between two moments on which his life is pinned. He feels like a man out of time. He could be Cuchulain, sailing for Alba; could be himself at twelve, or twenty, or ninety. He’s always lived like the next year would probably kill him. He imagines, for the first time, what it would be like to grow old.

Cuchulain died young.

Bucky’s head is tipped back, eyes closed. The incandescent bulb above him lays shadows across his face. He says, “Did he have a best friend?”

“Ferdia.” The word falls from Steve’s lips almost without him telling it to. The warm glow of the lights brings its own kind of stupor; he feels as though he’s in a trance. “They trained together, under a sorceress named Scáth. Years later Cuchulain killed him in battle. They were on the wrong sides of a war.”

Bucky opens his eyes again. Half-lidded, they slant like a cat’s. He says, “It’s a good thing we’re not in a story, then.”

Steve glances down. His purple tunic is drying in splotches. His hair dye is all washed out. He can just make out smudged paint on his own cheeks.

“Yeah,” he says. “A good thing.”

\---

Bucky follows him up the stairs like a ghost, a silent shadow at his back as they move through the kitchen. There’s no sign of the Kowalczyks, just a closed bedroom door. Steve’s nerve almost fails him, and he thinks of offering Bucky coffee, something to eat, but they’re both still soaked and chilled, need to get their clothes off, and they slip straight through to his and Sarah’s room.

Wet fabric slaps loud on Steve’s skin as he wrestles it over his head. Mere feet away, Bucky’s doing the same. Steve hesitates only an instant before pulling down his trousers. They’ve seen each other naked plenty of times, in the school changing rooms, at the beach, but this is different. This is —

This is Bucky’s eyes flicking down over Steve’s narrow chest, Bucky’s face sick and guilty and uncertain. This is Bucky wanting, wanting _him,_ and shamed by it, and Steve takes a deep breath and stands there in his boxers and suddenly knows what to say.

“If this isn’t what you want to be, I understand. For my part —” he breathes in carefully, evenly. “I’d rather we be more than less. Either way, though. I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.”

Bucky’s chest moves raggedly, blue shadows on his sternum. “Steve,” he says, and his voice cracks. “I’m like this. I get it. You don’t have to — just because I —”

“Buck,” says Steve, “shut up,” and walks up to him and kisses him.

He’ll always remember it like that, later. The first time was dizzy, instinctive. The second, he walks up to Bucky like you would to the grocery clerk. He stops a handsbreadth away and puts his lips on Bucky’s mouth.

Bucky freezes. There’s a fine trembling in his limbs; Steve can almost feel it in the air between them. Then he says, “God, you’re a fearless little shit,” and their chests are pressing together, Bucky’s hands in Steve’s hair, and Steve is skating his palms over Bucky’s hips and down around Bucky’s ass, and it’s not like he hasn’t drawn it a hundred times, a thousand, but touching it is _different,_ it’s different, and Bucky jumps a little and gasps, “ _Jesus,_ Steve.” That brings their erections brushing together, through just two layers of thin fabric, and Bucky sits down hard on the bed.

Steve stands over him for a moment, taller than Bucky for once in his life. Then Bucky catches his hand, twines their fingers, and Steve drops to the bed beside him, reaches to carefully turn Bucky’s face by the cheek, to keep kissing him. He sinks back onto the covers and pulls Bucky with him, on top of him, one hand on his hip and another on his jaw.

He’s seen men doing this, down back alleys. The hasty fumbling, their clothes in disarray. He’s seen their hands in each other’s trousers, their mouths on each other’s skin. He’s lingered, longer than he should, wondering what it would be like. This, he thinks, is better.

He’d have thought being on his back would make him the passive partner. It doesn’t; his hands are free to roam over Bucky’s back, his thighs, free to draw Bucky down into a kiss or press him up sitting so Steve can mouth his way over his taut belly, his chest. Bucky shivers and follows Steve’s lead and braces himself on his arms, as if Steve’s the one who knows what he’s doing here, and maybe he is.

Bucky doesn’t object when Steve slides his boxers down over the curve of his ass, followed by his own. He barely breathes when Steve threads a hand between their bodies and guides them together, starts jacking them both slow. Then he buries his face in Steve’s neck, breath warm and frantic on his skin, hips jerking in helpless half-thrusts, until he’s coming, they’re both coming, and Bucky sucks desperate kisses against Steve’s collarbone, the slight muscle of his shoulder.

They clean the mess before it cools, practical; they use the purple sheet. Then Bucky pulls Steve close to his chest and buries his nose in the hair just above Steve’s ear, breath whistling quietly in and out. Steve pulls Bucky’s arm over his belly, a dead weight, and draws the covers up over both of them.

They fall asleep like that, heavy and spent, intertwined. Bucky’s bare skin is warm against his back, his embrace like home. Steve wonders vaguely, from the edge of oblivion, how he ever drifted off any other way.

\---

They wake at one in the morning, because of the earthquake.

The bed sways and sidles beneath them, like a rollercoaster threatening to drop. The pictures rattle on the walls. One of Steve’s brushes falls from the easel, then another, then the whole thing collapses. The shaking stops.

Bucky sits up, looking around. Steve says, “Was that —”

Out in the street, a few horns are honking. Sleepy exclamations in scattered languages drift through the open window. Bucky says, “An earthquake.”

And just like that, they’re laughing. Both of them, laughing almost too hard to breathe, bent over and cackling; Bucky’s got one hand on Steve’s shoulder and the other clasping a stitch in his side, because they went roller skating in the rain, and came home to Steve’s apartment to do — that, and now there’s been a fucking _earthquake._

“You still have paint on your face,” says Bucky, when he comes up for air, and then, “it’s an earthquake. It’s not God punishing us. If it is I don’t care. I care about —”

Another tremor cuts him off. And this time they’re howling, clutching at each other for support, tears of laughter mixing with the colors on Steve’s cheeks. When the shaking stops, Steve wipes his eyes and says, “So, maybe we are in a story. What the hell. Even if the universe is against us. You know I’m with you —”

He can’t finish, choked by another spasm of laughter. Bucky’s grinning at him, and he’s not wearing any double face now; his eyes are mineshafts into giddy joy. He finishes for Steve, “‘til the end of the line.”

But the second tremor is the last. And it’s only a few hours until Sarah returns from her hospital shift, so Bucky picks up his clothes — still damp, but he shrugs that away — and Steve helps him wrestle them on. They kiss before he leaves. Bucky says, “This is normal now,” with a hint of a question in his voice.

“Yeah,” says Steve, and kisses him again. “Yeah, I think it’s normal.”

“Okay,” says Bucky. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He leaves out the fire escape, ducking past the lines of washing that dangle in the night. Steve watches him drop the final gap to the ground. Watches him thread his way through the late-night loiterers in the circles of light from the street lamps, under wrought-iron shadows and past a single, toppled garbage can.

He pauses when he reaches the corner. Steve knows Bucky can’t see him, in the darkened window, but he looks right at him anyway. He briefly tips an imaginary cap, and then he turns toward home. 

 

### III. October 31, 1936.

“I don’t know what that one is,” says Bucky.

Steve squints toward the girl he’s pointing at. Among the whirl of costumed skaters on the rink, she stands out. Her blue dress is patterned with something like scales, and at her thighs, the skirt breaks off into a train that extends behind her. It flares as she spins, fanning out, and Steve sees that it’s shaped like a fishtail.

“Mermaid?” he suggests. Bucky stares a moment longer and concedes, “Yeah, I guess.”

From their vantage on the grassy slope above the new rink, the Halloween festivities are a swirl of color. Steve’s not sure how half of the participants manage to skate in their costumes without falling over. Some of the children have their masks pushed up onto the tops of their heads, but others are careening through the crowds with nothing but narrow windows through Popeye’s squint or a clown’s contorted grin. Still others have their legs entangled in long skirts — colonial dames and ghosts in sheets — but fewer tumble than he might think, and the best of them swing like dancers, moving in rhythm to the Skaters’ Waltz.

There’s a sound truck there to provide the music, and an ambulance attending to minor scrapes and bruises, and a miniature city of carnival booths like a traveling Coney Island. Couples walk through it arm in arm, bobbing for apples and presenting their palms to the fortunetellers and stepping onto the weight-guesser’s scale.

They’re no younger than he and Bucky are. That’s strange to think about; that a year ago, he was painting Cuchulain’s shield. Sarah’s been in the ground for less than two weeks, and Steve feels a hundred years old.

He hates, like a dredge net dragging through his gut, the way his strength has waxed as hers waned. Hates that he hasn’t needed a hospital stay in years; that he is irrevocably small, yes, irrevocably weak and sickly and Less, but that he’s started to think about the murmurings of war in a new way. In an _I-could-go-there_ way. He’s been daydreaming about it constantly, equal measures of horror and longing. It’s slipped into the square jaws and locked steps of his paintings. It’s slipped into the colors, shadows stained in red and white and blue.

The apartment shouldn’t seem as quiet as it does. With her night shifts at the hospital, Sarah had never been around much anyway, these last few years — not until the final weeks of her illness. She’d said little, then, just coughed late into the night and turned her face to the wall.

Steve knows Bucky’s worried about him. When he thinks about it hard enough, he’s worried about himself. He moves through his days in automatic slow motion. Takes the train to his art classes. Keeps painting the same things he was painting before she died.

He let Bucky convince him to come here mostly because he felt bad. Because riding into Manhattan seemed a better option than sitting at home in the hollow space his mother left behind, with Bucky’s eyes on him in patient challenge and the shouts of children outside. Now, it feels like a mistake. He doesn’t have a costume — couldn’t bring himself to make one — and he can’t imagine joining the happy throngs. The Central Park sky is an anonymous blue dome, latticed with bare branches in savage filigree. Under it, Bucky’s scrutiny feels all the more pronounced.

Bucky says, quietly, “She’d want you to live.”

“She wouldn’t.” The words come out before Steve can stop them, harsh and ugly. “She never thought I even could.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Bucky, and leans back on the grass. Steve sort of hates him for it; for his easy acquiescence, his willingness to follow Steve down into the darkness of his own mind. Like if Steve believes it, it must be true. That stops him from saying the rest of what he’s thinking: _She spent my whole life waiting for me to die. Then she went and did it first._

The anger abandons him as quickly as it comes. He slumps back on the ground beside Bucky, and rubs a tired hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not myself.”

Bucky stretches, bumping their arms together, and settles his shoulderblades comfortably into the dirt. “You’re tellin’ me, pal.”

That makes Steve laugh, a little. “Sorry.”

From the corner of his eye, he sees Bucky cast a glance his way. It’s fond, assessing; there’s a pleased quirk to his lips. He’s glad to have gotten a reaction out of Steve, probably. Glad to have drawn him, even a meager inch, out of himself.

If Steve were a girl, Bucky might prop himself up on one elbow, now. He might lean down to kiss him. Steve’s brief happiness fades. Nothing in his life was ever built to last.

“There were mermaids in Irish folklore,” he says lightly, to cover the shadow crossing his face. “Merrows.”

Bucky doesn’t comment on the evasion. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve echoes. “Kind of like Scottish selkies. They wore magical caps that let them live underwater.”

“I’d like one of those,” says Bucky.

Steve ignores him. “Sometimes they came onto land and married mortal men. But they would always long for the sea. A merrow’s husband would hide her cap from her so she couldn’t return. But she would find it, and then she would leave him — her husband and her children both — and disappear under the waves.”

There’s a long silence between them. Then Bucky sits up. “Steve,” he says. “Your mom didn’t jump in the ocean.”

Steve swallows. _Didn’t she?_ He thinks of all the Atlantic took from Sarah Rogers. Her own family, when they failed to follow her down to Galway’s docks from the peatsmoke-haunted drystone hut that lives like a myth in his mind. Her husband, who crossed it to fight in another world’s war. Or maybe he was never her husband. As Bucky will never be Steve’s.

He chokes on the thought of it — Bucky, his _husband_ — and suddenly he’s laughing. Years of unacknowledged emotion bubble out his throat and his eyes are watering, stinging, but he can’t stop laughing, and Bucky’s got an arm around him, Bucky’s pulling him close to his chest, murmuring, “Hey. _Hey._ ” with his hand bracing Steve’s jaw and his chin on the crown of his head. He doesn’t say anything else, just holds him there and lets Steve laugh himself out.

When he’s done, he feels like a dry cornhusk, empty and useless on the autumn wind. He says, “I forged her marriage certificate.”

Bucky stills. He’s never heard this story, and it’s nothing, Steve thinks, it means nothing, but Bucky stills like it matters. So Steve says, “When I was eleven. To get her widow’s pension. That’s why we moved to Congress Street.” The word makes him shudder; he doesn’t want to go back there, to the faded things his mother left behind.

Bucky is like a marble statue, still holding Steve in his arms. He says, “So they weren’t —”

“I don’t know,” says Steve. “I _don’t know._ She said they were. It doesn’t matter.”

It takes Bucky a long time to answer. When he does, he releases his hold on Steve incrementally. Steve flexes his neck where it’s been trapped tight against Bucky’s chest. Bucky says, “I’ve been thinking of getting my own place.”

Steve sits up all the way, forcing Bucky to release him. He studies Bucky’s face. Bucky’s asked him to come stay with the Barnes family before. This is different. “I thought you were thinking about the CCC.”

“Yeah, well.” Bucky shrugs. “Now that I’ve got the meat market job, it seems stupid to ditch it. And I’ll be off the relief lists. They might not take me.”

That’s bullshit. Steve knows it’s bullshit. Bucky doesn’t want to be writing down careful columns of prices and helping harried mothers choose their cut of ham. He wants mountains, deserts, canyons. He wants adventure. He wants the world.

“I’ll forge your application,” Steve says. He gives Bucky a lopsided smile: _I’m joking, but not really_. “You know I’m good for it.”

Bucky laughs. “Fuck off, Rogers. Come on. Move in with me.”

Steve feels his smile slip. He lets it; lets Bucky see the naked uncertainty in his eyes. “Are you sure?”

Bucky swallows. “Yeah.” His voice is rough suddenly, uneven. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

“I have too many art supplies. I’ll get paint on everything,” Steve warns him.

Bucky’s lips quirk slightly upward. “You already do.”

“I’m a terrible cook. I’m an Irishman who hates corned beef.”

The smile is growing. “Knew that, too.”

“I’ll be gone at art classes half the time. I’ll come home at odd hours and won’t shut up about them. I’ll have bad moods about colors.” His voice cracks. “I’ll have bad moods all — _all_ the time.”

Bucky just nods gravely.

“If they pick me for one of these WPA jobs, it’ll be even worse.” He hasn’t thought about that application. Not since October 15th. He remembers something else. “I’m not gonna shine your shoes.”

“Steve.” Bucky’s hand skims his cheek, face serious. It matches again. He could be made of glass, his whole soul bared for Steve to see. He says, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

\---

The weather this year is fine, and it’s not until hours later that the skaters all go home. The sound truck carries through the Skaters’ Waltz and the Blue Danube and others Steve doesn’t know, and he and Bucky descend from their overlook to find a hot dog stand and amble through the booths. They don’t hold hands, but they do let their fingers brush, occasionally, and sneak each other smiles wider than they usually dare.

The crowds are thinning out when Bucky seizes his hand, for real this time, and says, “Come on. Let’s go skating.”

Steve frowns at him. “You told me you weren’t bringing skates.”

Bucky shrugs and lifts his eyebrows. “I lied.”

So Steve wrestles on his skates, again, and finds his feet, again, on the dark rink’s lamplit shore. He’s unsteady, but he rises without Bucky’s help, this time; takes his first few shaky steps before finding the rhythm that keeps him upright. He sails into the darkness at the rink’s center, barely able to see his feet. He’s still not entirely sure how he’s supposed to stop.

Then Bucky swoops around his left side, laughing, body a slanting sculpture Steve’s hands ache to mold. He crosses his legs in precise, graceful steps; he flows. And Steve thinks, _I have this. I get to have this. I —_

Words fail him, even within his own mind. The pavement here is smooth as glass, as ice. It hasn’t yet been through the hard wear of a New York winter. It’s far finer than the old rink, than the potholed street outside Steve’s window.

And all those years of skating through elbows and bruising sticks show, suddenly. Bucky skates backward for several strides, then turns smartly, whipping his body around, and loops another circle to come up alongside Steve.

“Come on,” he says. “Dance with me.”

“Buck,” tries Steve. “I have no idea what I’m doing on these things. _And_ I don’t dance.”

“You do now,” says Bucky, and takes Steve’s hand.

He does all the work, of course. Steve just tries to breathe through the laughter and hang on to Bucky’s hand as he wheels them around the empty rink, grinning and humming, drawing their faces together and kissing him once, daring, in the dark. It’s not like last time, in the rain. There are still walkers moving along the lamplit pathways, couples out for an evening stroll — like them and unlike them, anonymous in the night.

_It doesn’t matter if they were married,_ Steve thinks. It strikes him suddenly, a lightning-flash revelation, and it catches in his stride, making him totter. Bucky casts him an inquiring look, but Steve shakes his head; it’s not something that needs saying. _It matters if he loved her. If he would have loved me._

Sarah had always said he would. On days when she herself could barely meet Steve’s eyes; on nights when the nurses told her to stay by his bedside, because they couldn’t promise he would be there in the morning. She’d told him once, choked with tears, _You’ll get to see Joseph now, Stevie. You’re going home —_

Bucky dips him. Steve yelps with surprise, one skate flailing in the air, wheels spinning. The next moment he’s upright again, hand grasping at Bucky’s shirt, then draws back to smack him, lightly, in the chest. _Ma,_ he thinks, _I am._

They skate until even Bucky’s legs are weary, and barely stumble far enough to flop on their backs in the grass. Bucky shifts his leg so it’s a warm line of contact down Steve’s, turning his head so his hair — too long again, and damp with sweat — brushes Steve’s cheek. He says, “So. When they pick you to do one of those big mural things. What are you going to paint?”

They’re not going to pick him for a mural. Steve knows better than that; he’s a nobody, unestablished, just another jobless artist the government might give some cash in return for the nebulous task of representing America. But he says, automatically, “You. I’d paint you.”

Bucky’s head shifts, then stills. He’s checking himself, Steve knows; checking his urge to protest his unworthiness, even after everything. So Steve says, “On the tenements off Congress, all across the walls. Playing street shinny. With a ribbon in your hair. Hell, I’ll paint you on the manhole covers. I’ll paint you beating up Daly, if you like.”

Bucky’s lips curl, hesitant, a smile hovering a breath above his face. “Only if you also paint yourself. Saving that cat.”

Happiness, Steve thinks, is contagious. Maybe they are in a story. If they are, it’s probably the strangest anyone ever wrote.

He reaches out to lace his fingers with Bucky’s. America — that’s what the WPA artists are supposed to paint. Deserts, canyons, mountains. They’ll get to those someday. But America’s also people, individuals, and Steve’s always been good at painting people. Especially Bucky Barnes.

Steve takes a deep breath, and releases it to the night air. He sends his hurt along with it. His love. Somewhere, maybe, it will help speed his mother’s ghost across the waves.

Under cover of darkness, they could be anyone, anywhere. He draws Bucky’s hand to his lips, presses a careful kiss to his knuckles. He wonders if his parents ever lay in the grass like this, dreaming themselves awake.

He says, “It’s a deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> Did you want notes on my historical research? No? TOO BAD. You're getting notes on my historical research.
> 
>   * A lot of my source material for this fic comes from the New York Times digital archives. I've linked some articles below, but they are mostly behind a paywall. Paywall links are numbered and placed in parentheses; other links should be accessible to anyone.
>   * Roller skating carnivals were popular events in 1930s New York; that organized by Parks Department for Halloween 1935 ([1](https://nyti.ms/2GS7DSA), [2](https://nyti.ms/2xgrD1Q)) stands among dozens of others documented by the New York Times (e.g. [3](https://nyti.ms/2LykXPr)). This fic was inspired by a set of WPA posters for the 1936 Halloween roller skating carnival: see [here](https://www.loc.gov/item/98518524/) and [here](https://www.loc.gov/item/98518535/). It was at least the second year it ran — the 1935 carnival was indeed delayed until the following day because of the rain, but I couldn’t find documentation as to whether it had run previous years or continued after 1936. Elsewhere, the Times covers the popularity of street shinny, as well ([4](https://nyti.ms/2Lx6D9S)).
>   * I swear to God I did not make up that earthquake for dramatic effect. There was a goddamn earthquake felt in Brooklyn on the night of Halloween, 1935 ([5](https://nyti.ms/2M1DrYR)). I almost didn't want to include it. It seemed over-the-top. But there you go.
>   * The [Irish Literary Revival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Literary_Revival) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries breathed new life into old Irish legends and placed them at the center of the evolving national consciousness and identity. I see Steve's interest in those stories developing from that wealth of literature — much of it accessible to popular audiences and available at the New York Public Library — and out of his prior exposure to mythology in children's stories, e.g. Padraic Colum's [_The Children's Homer_](https://archive.org/details/childrenshomerad00colu), which he carries among his books in the first part of this fic. His curiosity about his own background, especially that of his father (who I've written as hailing from Northern Island/Ulster in part due to the Protestant "P" on Steve's dog tags — see [this discussion](https://historicallyaccuratesteve.tumblr.com/post/92559081749/protestant-steve-rogers-v-catholic-steve-rogers)), leads him to other stories such as Eleanor Hull's [_The Boys' Cuchulain_](https://archive.org/details/boyscuchulainher00hull), Yeats's [_Irish Fairy Tales_](https://archive.org/details/fairytalesirish00yeatrich) (which includes "The Lady of Gollerus," a merrow tale), and eventually, as he gets older, L. Winifred Faraday's [_The Cattle Raid of Cualnge_](https://archive.org/details/cattleraidcualn00faragoog), from which he draws his descriptions of Cuchulain's appearance. However, the Irish names are spelled in this fic as in Hull, Steve's original source of Cuchulain mythology.
> 

> 
> Anyway. My Steve is a bit of a nerd. But not nearly as unreasonable a nerd as I am. As for the parallels between Cuchulain and his own story: they hurt me too. I'll leave you with this. I'm sorry.
>
>> _And he became companion and arms-bearer to Ferdia, because he was the younger and because they loved each other, and all the time he was with Scáth they went together into every danger, and every peril, and they took journeys together, and saw strange sights. And because the twain loved each other, they swore that never in life would either hurt or wound the other, but that for ever and for ever they twain would aid and support each other in war and in combat, and in all the pleasant loving ways of peace. But Scáth knew that other days were coming, for she was a seer._   
> 
> 
> ETA: I went and did the [tumblr thing](https://gravelghosts.tumblr.com/post/180246236809/mcu-fic-remsc%C3%A9la-stevebucky-94k), if you want to reblog.


End file.
